


Basketcase

by riyku



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 15:59:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10666011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riyku/pseuds/riyku
Summary: Klepto + Basketcase 4eva.





	Basketcase

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whispered_story](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whispered_story/gifts).



> written for spnspringfling, as a gift for the absolutely lovely akintay.
> 
> a million thanks to exaggerated_specificity. my dearest sunshine, who held my hand and stayed up way, way, _way_ past our bedtime and talked me off of the cliff at three o'clock in the morning. dunno, guys. she's a keeper.

The bed beside Jared's is unoccupied, has been for about a month. Push-pin holes above the headboard, half the drawers in the dresser stand empty, and dust has been colonizing the top two bookshelves. Jared doesn't know much about the boy who's going to be sleeping two feet from him tonight. He has a name: Jensen. He knows he's sixteen years old, he's been a ward of the state off and on for the last five of those years, and that he's a _special case_.

Jared’s had a lot of brothers and sisters, and he supposes that they’ve all been special cases, figures that everyone is, when you get right down to it. Most of them have stayed for a handful of weeks, some have stayed a few months, a couple of them longer. First there was Annie, who pulled the wheels off all of Jared’s matchbox cars, and then there was Seth, only seven and already didn’t trust the world or the people in it. Marc was next, and he liked to eat the heads off of burnt matches, used to hide matchbooks underneath his mattress and always smelled like sulphur. Patricia showed up after that, who came to them wanting to be called Pattie and left wanting to be called Trish, who swung her hips when she knew someone was looking and always liked to hold Jared’s hand when they walked to the park.

It had been around then, two years ago, at the age of thirteen, that Jared had figured out once and for all that he wasn’t like most other boys.

 

***

 

The house smells like sugar. It's part of the ritual when someone new walks through the revolving door of the system. Clean sheets on the bed, fresh cookies in the oven, a lock on the door to the liquor cabinet.

As Jared window-peeks from the safety of his bedroom, a sedan slides up to the curb, a forgettable beige non-color. A woman gets out. Power suit and sensible shoes, a manilla folder tucked under one arm. The passenger door opens before Jared's foster dad can get to it and Jensen steps up onto the sidewalk, shakes hands with him after a small, encouraging nudge from the social worker.

Jensen's tall, slender at the waist and wide at the shoulders, has a soft, dream-boy mouth and is currently sporting a black eye worthy of a prize fighter. His cargo pants are cut-off and his army surplus boots look like they could use a little more duct tape, and Jared's palms are beginning to sweat, go slippery against the windowsill. Jensen reaches back into the car and pulls out a backpack. That's it. No boxes or milk crates, nothing to populate the empty shelves, plenty to populate Jared's galloping imagination, and by the time Jensen's made it to the front door, Jared's daydreamed them all the way into a swanky loft apartment somewhere, sitting cozy with matching tattoos and matching rings. Hey, honey, I'm home like a loop in his head and he hasn't even heard Jensen's voice yet.

A shave and a haircut knock on his door--their door--has Jared flinging himself toward his bed, grabbing a forgettable airport paperback from the bedside table and opening it vaguely in the middle, muttering a choked out, "Yeah."

Jensen barely gives Jared a glance when he comes in, throws his backpack onto his bed and his ass onto it a second later, gives the mattress a small, diagnostic bounce. He's chewing with his mouth open and the way he sucks fresh-baked chocolate off of his fingers is a crime. Up close, his black eye is a hell of a thing, mottled purple and red, yellow at the edges, makes his eyes that much more green.

"You're Jared," Jensen says. It's not a question. He waves his cookie-crumbed hand at Jared's t-shirt. "Radiohead sucks."

 

***

 

Jensen's from two towns over, can't believe they don't lock their doors in this neck of the woods. He's fresh outta juvie, nowhere to go since his dad's doing a stint for too many stacked up DUI's this time. The black eye was a parting gift from a skinhead who didn't like getting called a cocksucker. He's a self-proclaimed klepto, has a habit of picking stuff up from store shelves and forgetting to put it back.

His voice is hoarse and soft, his mouth dirty-beautiful, and it takes Jared all of about twenty-eight hours and one nefariously acquired nutty-buddy to fall in love. Jared thinks of it as their first date. Cheap, chalky icecream is better than flowers.

 

***

 

"What's your story?" Jensen flops over, the screech of bedsprings very loud in the still house.

Jared's getting used to the sound of Jensen's breath, has learned to recognize when he falls asleep. Too quickly, he's starting to rely on the soft humming noises Jensen makes when he's out cold.

"Don't really have one," Jared tells him. To hear Jensen talk sometimes, it's like he's the leading man in his very own dark comedy. High speed chases and broken bottles, underground punk shows where something inevitably gets set on fire, a series of cosmic misfortunes. Nothing Jared could say can compete.

"Everybody has one. I wanna know, if you wanna tell me." He's whispering now, somehow seems closer for it, boys telling secrets in the dark.

"They dropped me off outside of a firehouse when I was a baby," Jared says, the line repeated so often in his short life that it sounds worn and dog-eared coming out of his mouth, like a history that belongs to someone else.

"Who did?" Jensen reaches over without looking at him, spider-walks his fingers along the edge of Jared's mattress.

"Never found out. They'd written my first name on one arm and my birthday on the other, whoever it was, like a goddamn parting gift."

Jensen scuffs his knuckles against his shoulder, his touch like a livewire hooked directly into Jared's nervous system. A quick shock, then Jensen pulls his arm back. "I hate them."

"I don't. Not worth the effort, really."

"Wait a minute," Jensen says, lifting himself up on an elbow, "Did they leave you in a basket? 'Cause that woulda been badass." His grin is huge, bright enough to light up the room. He doesn't smile often, but when he does it's in a big way. Every single time.

 

***

 

"Hey, basketcase." Jensen stoops down in the driveway, where Jared's tinkering with the lawnmower, disassembling and reassembling it, trying to teach himself the ins and outs of the internal combustion engine.

Jared outwardly grumbles about the new nickname, inwardly can't get enough of it.

"It's too quiet here, makes me feel like I'm about to crawl out of my skin." The bruises around Jensen's eye are taking their time getting better, still a galaxy of broken capillaries. His nose is going pink, his cheeks are too, and it's so _adorable_ , not that Jared will ever mention it.

"We could walk down to the creek later. You could go swimming." Jared won't touch a toe to any body of water where he can't see the bottom, hasn't since a particularly traumatic viewing of _Stand by Me_ a few years ago.

"See? It's so fucking leave it to Beaver around here. Isn't there anywhere we can go to get into trouble?"

"Sure," Jared says, "we could hotwire a car. Knock over a jewelry store. Kill a man, just to watch him die, then flee to Mexico. Turn into our very own Johnny Cash song."

"That's golden. On the run, just you and me, basketcase." He curls his hand around the back of Jared's neck and touches their foreheads together.

Jared's heart feels shuddery and weird, lodged in his throat. He tries to swallow it down and says, "Let me get these spark plugs cleaned up first."

 

***

 

It's an hour past curfew when Jensen comes home. Ear pressed to his bedroom door, Jared listens to the concerned mumbling of his foster parents, makes out Jensen telling them that he's fine, everything's okay, go to bed, tracks Jensen's footsteps into the bathroom and forces himself to hold back a full five excruciating minutes before slipping across the hall. He scratches at the door and doesn't wait for Jensen to open it.

The first thing Jared sees is a set of scuffed up knuckles, grit and grime in the gashes. Then he's onto the fresh bruise on Jensen's jaw, the blood on his mouth. The glaringly bright splatters of it from where Jensen has spit in the sink.

"You're late," Jared says, mouth working on auto-pilot when he really wants to ask Jensen if he's alright, tell him that he has to be alright, that it's only been two weeks but Jared doesn't think he can sleep anymore without Jensen in the room.

"Took me a while to find some trouble," Jensen says, like it's any kind of explanation at all.

"Why?" Jared takes him by the wrist, Jensen's pulse fluttery against his fingers.

"Because it's too easy here. And because I don't like getting called a cocksucker either." Jensen puts his back to the sink, patient as Jared cleans him up, silent while Jared pastes bandaids across his knuckles. He doesn't even bitch about the cartoon characters on them.

There's a kind of thoughtless grace in the slope of Jensen's neck, the long line of his body fitted so close to Jared's. He keeps licking at a split in his bottom lip and Jared can't stop wanting to do it for him.

"They had no fucking clue," Jensen says, eyes fixed in the neighborhood of Jared's shoulder.

"Who? What? Whoever did this to you?"

Another flick of Jensen's tongue. A breathy laugh over something that isn't funny. Jensen shifts and their feet knock together.

"God, no. Forget about him. I'm talking about the person who left you at the firehouse. If…if I had you, I'd never give you up."

When Jensen meets Jared's gaze, it's a bare thing. An insides on the outside brand of honesty. Jensen will laugh through a busted mouth, a black eye, a fight that's ugly as homemade sin, but this is scaring the hell out of him.

"I'm right here." Jared says simply, "you do have me." There's no resistance as Jared pulls Jensen in closer, feels the structure of his spine and the strength of the muscles he keeps hidden under baggy t-shirts and worn flannel. Jensen's skin is warm and the grip he has on Jared's hips is steady. His lips taste like old pennies and his tongue is very, very sweet.

 

***

 

 

It's been four weeks to the day since Jensen showed up. Two weeks since Jared kissed him for the first time and they stopped sleeping in separate beds. One week since Jared first sucked Jensen off, choked and sputtered and fucked it up in every imaginable way, only to have Jensen drag him up and lick his mouth clean. Four days since Jared found out how it feels inside of Jensen, heard his soft gasps and felt him hold on so incredibly tight, say things that made him blush red as roses the next morning.

Now Jared can't do anything except sit on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest and watch as Jensen packs his backpack. Every t-shirt or pair of boxers stowed away etches a brand new crack in his heart.

An aunt has crawled out of the woodwork, willing to take over the care and feeding of her brother's kid. Blood beats out bureacracy.

"I'm stealing this," Jensen ditches his own shirt and puts one of Jared's on instead, stretches out the collar until Jared can see the mark he sucked onto his neck. Jared wears its match on his own skin. They're not tattoos, but they'll have to do. Some bruises are better than others.

"Klepto. It's not stealing if I give it to you," Jared points out. "Anyway, I thought you said Radiohead sucks."

Jensen shoves at Jared's legs until he drops them, then sinks down into his lap, thighs snug around Jared's waist. "Yeah, maybe, but you don't." He kisses Jared slow, like he's trying to make it last. "Don't worry, basketcase. I said I wouldn't give you up. I always keep my promises."

\--end


End file.
